MVMT50 Tackles Key Issues For Blacks In Tech

The SXSW Interactive Festival has only gotten bigger and bigger with each year. This year’s SXSW, this weekend, includes more than 800 sessions on a variety of innovative topics related to technology – and black techies are also having their say with panels from MVMT50.

MVMT50 is a collection of thought leaders from many industries that touch the tech space. The group gathers every year during SXSW to highlight and discuss the impact minorities have in shaping innovation and growing their respective industries, applications, products and services.

This year, MVMT50 hits SXSW with five days of panels and workshops. Check out a few:

Almost every Monday night when the Vh1 reality show Love & Hip Hop Atlanta airs, its black and Latina characters, their actions and the title of the show dominate Twitter’s trending topics (they’re often seven of the 10 top trending topics on Twitter). The same happens when other black television and award shows are broadcast. Black shows are not only a television event but they’ve also become a huge social media affair. African-Americans watch television an additional two hours more than the national average, and African-Americans use Twitter more than other Americans. African-Americans are not just social television participants, they are major players. The rise of social television, watching television and posting on social media simultaneously, has an important impact on television producers, advertisers and viewers. Social media buzz about television shows has created a new barometer for popularity and a crop of apps that allow viewers to connect directly to the producers and cast

A startup is born everyday. With the growing trends in technology, the key is finding innovative ways to fund these companies for longevity. Typical startups go through several rounds of funding. During each round, companies are attempt to raise critical funding, retain a strong equity position and garner enough momentum to move to their next level. A growing trend to raise seed money in the past few years has been crowdfunding via web based technologies. An emerging source of startup capital is securing a Celebrity Angel Investor. This panel will include startups that have successfully secured funding from celebrities such as T.I. ( also known as Clifford Harris) and retired professional athletes.

Learn how to get the attention of an A List celebrity who is involved in multiple projects and maintains such a busy schedule.

We all know stereotyping in the physical world is unacceptable, but should that same lesson extend into the social and digital marketing spheres? What assumptions can I make about someone coming from Univision.com? What about Complex.com? Is there a different path to purchase for African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, or the LGBT consumer than their Caucasian, non-Hispanic counterparts? Is this true for every category? You might buy hair products leading with your ethnicity – but what about a computer? Interactive marketing allows you to move beyond your customers demographics to look at a larger, arguably more relevant lifestyle segmentation. Knowing when and how to think about diverse segments is a must for today’s marketers. Gaining greater access to some of the most lucrative and fastest growing customer groups will help you rise above your competition or retain your market share.

You can’t innovate without diversity. Period. Yet most of the proposed solutions to increasing diversity in tech involve people of color moving to Silicon Valley (leaving their social and supports networks) or exposing black youth to coding (who then go back to techless homes and schools). So, what’s the solution? In this thought provoking presentation, learn about the very real cultural, technological, and historical barriers to increasing the number of blacks in tech and how digitalundivided is directly addressing those barriers.

Much like the public protest of the Civil Rights Era, Black Twitter can be a rallying force that can shut down Juror B37’s proposed book deal in a matter of hours or initiate the career suicide of suspected racists (we see you, #PaulaDeen). But for all its potential for good, Black Twitter has a tendency for having no chill whatsoever. When footage of the #Sharkeisha assault or #MyGirlfriendNotAllowedTo becomes the butt of a “joke” it reflects the true dangers of Black Twitter, where violent behavior is not only condoned but promoted for the sake of being a trending topic. This panel will discuss the dark side of Black Twitter and the social responsibility of its members.